1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network management. In particular, the present invention relates to managing network capacity in a capacity management system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Broadband communication networks generally comprise large numbers of network elements, which in turn produce and track large quantities of data. Companies that operate these communication networks generally perform calculations on these data for various purposes, such as to optimize the use of resources. Capacity Management Systems (CMS) are used to plan, analyze, size, and optimize network capacity. A typical CMS processes vast amounts of data that are collected from a variety of sources. The process of capacity management generally comprises several stages, including obtaining data from network elements, parsing the data, loading the data into a relational database, and performing data analysis. Generally, a file clean-up stage is also involved. The process of capacity management is ideally proactive and responsive to business needs.
Applications currently used in CMS often rely on propriety configuration and hard coding of formatting “rules” to complete a task. In addition, available applications tend to focus only on a single aspect of data management (i.e. data loading only, data parsing only, etc.) rather then on creating end-to-end solutions. Oracle Corporation's SQL Loader is an example of an available application that handles only one aspect of data management, e.g. loading data into a database. As a result, developers generally have to design and develop complex parsers and data base loaders for each individual data source for a given set of network elements. This individual development can cause a great deal of duplicate functional coding efforts in support of different CMS applications. In addition, such a process is time-consuming. There is a need for an improved end-to-end solution for data management within a capacity management system.